THANKS to Conrad Shawcross, people in the Greenwich Peninsula area of London have started seeing things that aren’t there, to spare them the sight of things that are. For an artist fascinated by the breakdown of rationality, that must count as a success.

I visited his studio, intrigued to find out what had inspired his huge, sense-bending new work, The Optic Cloak, and the elegant mechanical artworks that made his name.

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Shawcross works in London, in a converted Victorian tram stables with floors removed so to house the characteristically big sculptures and machines, and the team that helps him make them. Closing a door on the metallic clanging from the main workshop space, the artist explained the initial “problem” that prompted The Optic Cloak.

When a low-carbon district heating plant was proposed for the Greenwich Peninsula, local authorities insisted that its 50-metre flues must not be seen rising above the skyline. Shawcross’s solution was to conceal the flues inside perforated, folded panels of brushed aluminium that invoke the moiré effect – the illusory patterns that appear when one regular pattern, such as a fine mesh, overlays another.

Unusually for a structure of its height, The Optic Cloak is only 3 metres deep. It is this slender gap between the front and back faces that allows the moiré patterns to arise from the metal meshes, and Shawcross has tuned the sizes, spacing and orientation of the holes so that the patterns shift, swell and shrink in response to a viewer’s movement.

Easier on the eye

The see-through structure fulfilled his aesthetic and environmental aims for the project. An earlier plan had been to enclose the flues in a monolithic 600-tonne steel box, but Shawcross objected to a design that would not only be visually weighty but would also use so much material on a project that was supposed to be environmentally friendly.

His design solves both problems: not only does the mesh cladding make The Optic Cloak look lighter than the planned box, but its elegant support structure is far less massive. Overall, that structure is 40 per cent lighter but will still withstand a gale because it allows wind to pass through. The holes mean that The Optic Cloak is easier on the eye, too. The dancing moiré patterns are meant to “make the surface very beguiling,” he says, to “make it disappear”. They also turn the structure from a silhouette into a shimmering presence, or vice versa, as the sun moves across the sky.

The concealment brief gave Shawcross a clue to another way of making the structure less visually dominant. He explored the history of disguise and became intrigued by the high-contrast dazzle camouflage painted on ships in the first world war. It was all about “how an object can disappear and yet become more arresting on a horizon”.

“I’m not a very good colourist,” he says. So instead of using colour to disrupt perception of the structure’s shape, he has folded and angled the cladding panels, experimenting first with paper to find shapes that would tile together symmetrically.

“Dancing moiré patterns turn the structure from a silhouette into a shimmering presence“

Conrad Shawcross in his studio

Charles Emerson

His final aim was broader: “One of the things I said to [the developers] was, ‘Look, it is a real mistake to pretend this is not a chimney. We have to celebrate this as a chimney. They’re iconic objects in our landscape. You can’t be embarrassed that you’re producing power.’ ”

So there are paradoxes here: the camouflage that’s arresting, the cloak that celebrates what it hides. Although they reflect the functional requirements of The Optic Cloak, Shawcross insists: “I don’t really see this as an artwork. It is a cladding system for an industrial object.”

Such paradoxes inspire his pure art, too. Take Timepiece, an orrery-like machine installed in 2013 at the centre of a vast, circular, former train shed in London, its structure based on 24 even segments of the circle. Two powerful lamps were mounted at the end of polished metal arms that slowly and smoothly rotated at the end of other rotating arms, tracing out complex trajectories and casting ever-changing shadows.

At first sight, it looked like a homage to the Newtonian clockwork universe, the mathematically predictable rotations and orbits in space that allow us to keep time on Earth. For Shawcross, though, the clock is an example of what he calls “the cloak of rationality”. The 24 hours of the day, he points out, represent nothing real other than ease of divisibility. The 360 degrees of a circle are derived from the number of days in a year, but only if you write off five and a quarter of those days, as some ancient cultures are said to have done, for the sake of easy arithmetic.

You might expect to find triumphalism rather than doubt when it comes to a monumental sculpture in front of a striking new scientific research institute in central London. And indeed Shawcross’s Paradigm is impressive. It was installed in front of the Francis Crick Institute, between St Pancras International rail station and The British Library, in February: a stack of steel tetrahedra in which each is 10 per cent bigger than the one below, so that although the base is only 80 centimetres across, the top, 14 metres above, spans 5 metres. It looks balanced, but only just, and that’s how Shawcross intended it to be.

“If you carry on adding [tetrahedra] it gets more and more mighty but it becomes more prone to collapse – indeed, if you add another tet to the top it will fall over. It’s working very hard already,” he says. “It’s a very rational, confident form, but it’s meant to be sobering, or ominous, in that it’s meant to allude to the inevitability of collapse or the precariousness of knowledge.

“The reason it’s called Paradigm is that it refers directly to Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm collapse, and this idea that healthy science has to topple old paradigms, in order for new ones to grow up.”

It’s not the first time Shawcross has worked with tetrahedra. More than 10 years ago, he set himself the challenge of exploring the limits and potential of this simplest Platonic solid. He ordered 6000 pieces of computer-cut oak and spent weeks turning them into 1000 tetrahedra so that he could experiment with the ways they fitted together.

Counter-intuitively, they don’t fit neatly together, and the first artworks he made with them were unruly: “I was completely bamboozled by them, because they just formed these fiery tendrils. Artistically, I wasn’t able to control it, it was really defining itself. It was forming these bifurcating things that couldn’t then join back onto themselves.”

“I’m trying to be a bit unnerving. My primary goal is to chisel away at the sense of reality“

He left tetrahedra alone for years, but one property had caught his imagination: the stacked form that the inventor Buckminster Fuller called a tetrahelix. Not only do the outside edges of the stack form an elegant triple helix, but unlike every other Platonic solid, stacked tetrahedra never rotate back to their original angle. Intrigued by this fusion of rationality and irrationality, Shawcross made the “audacious” 18-metre wooden tetrahelix Axiom (Tower) for the British Ministry of Justice in 2009.

I wondered what he thought people gained by exposure to these mathematical and philosophical concepts. “I guess with the work I’m trying to be a bit unnerving,” he said. “It’s trying to ask questions rather than answer them. My primary goal is not to educate people – I just want to chisel away at the sense of reality. I hope the work illuminates how incomplete things are in terms of our understanding or our sensory envelope. I’m not trying to preach.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Perfecting the art of collapse”